Jack Spicer’s Pricks and Cocksuckers

Queer-identified authors may use translation to articulate their own sexual identity or to develop a queer politics. The gay American poet Jack Spicer was particularly interested in using his translations for both ends. To be openly gay (what is referred to here as ‘visible’) in the United States during the 1950s was both a dangerous and politically charged position. Through his 1957 translations of the work of Federico García Lorca, a gay Spanish modernist poet, Spicer forces Lorca into this precarious position of gay visibility while reclaiming the American poet Walt Whitman from a critical tradition that insists on masking his homosexuality. Spicer’s translation of Lorca’s ‘Oda a Walt Whitman’ gives us a better understanding of how and why his utilization of a recognizably homosexual lexicon pushes homosexuality into his possibly resistant readers’ attention, demonstrating how the lexicon and register of translated texts can serve as critical apparatuses that create forms of alternative politics in a socio-historically specific manner.